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HTPC, getting serious with mini ITX

T

tuberc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 10, 2008
Messages
131
Hi all,

My htpc has seen some long hours of use in the last 2-3 years. Especially with my old flat mate watching entire seasons of TV shows on a daily basis. Looking back it has provided so much entertainment to me and my friends, tv shows, movies and listening to music.It really has been a center piece of the living room.

The hardware used for the actual machine was always whatever was left over after upgrading my gaming rig, except for the HDD's which were bought and upgraded when the media collection became too large. Most of the time it didn't even have a case, just the components laid out beside the TV or hidden in a drawer underneath.

So after all this time I have decided to build a proper htpc.

First off it has to be small, the last mainboard was m-ATX and powered by a small form factor PSU, the HDD's were mounted in a seperate hard drive enclosure. The obvious step was to go ITX. I already have an SSD and I wanted room for two HDD's, for now.

The plan in the future is to build a NAS, which will hold all the media and backups from other laptops etc. But that will take some time. So I will need to keep my two main drives, a Samsung 1.5TB and 2TB. When the NAS is finally built it will house these drives, and free up some space in the htpc itself.
 
First off the case, a very important piece due to the size constraints of basic plan.

LC-Power LC-1320mi 75W mITX
http://www.schwanthaler-computer.de...mini-itx/1356/geh-lc-power-lc-1320mi-75w-mitx
imgres



Cheap and plain looking but it does the job. Pico type PSU with only 75watts, not a lot of power but enough to get everything running. Its main advantage is the lack of a dedicated fan.
I have removed the optical tray because I download my media these days. this allowed space for the hard drives.

Then come the rest of the parts:
CPU - Intel Celeron G1610, should have enough power to play HD movies
Mainboard - ASRock B75M-ITX B75 1155 mITX
Memory - taken from old machine, OCZ 4Gb DDR3
SSD - OCZ Agility 2 60Gb

I assembled the components outside of the case to test everything, it all powered up fine first go but the standard cooler that came with the Celeron is way too loud. Even the standard cooler that came from the last CPU I bought (i3 3220) is much quieter. So the following cooler will be added to the parts list, Scythe Kozuti 2HE!

Pictures and update to come.
 
I decided to share this build here to help some of the people who have questions about their own builds and what works in the real world. From initial tests the hardware is more than capable of playing mkv movies, its responsive and gives a smooth overall experience.

Windows 7 has been installed along with mediabrowser in windows media center. With the free 'chocolate' theme it is a real pleasure to navigate on the big screen.
 
I just pulled the trigger on this build, arrives tomorrow:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1qsmu

Sans harddrives its ~400. You could axe most of the ram too (I need the ram for ZFS) to bring it down to probably 300-320 The mobo has 6 sata connectors too so no need for expansion slots. The powersupply would need a molex > sata power connector though (~5 dollars).
 
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